With $8 Million on the Line, It Is More Than Just a Game

Boise State’s Kyle Brotzman missed a 29-yard field goal attempt in overtime against Nevada on Nov. 26, his second miss of the game. The missed kicks cost Boise State a likely spot in the Rose Bowl.Credit
Cathleen Allison/Associated Press

Ten days, 250 miles and millions of dollars away from the Rose Bowl in California, Boise State will play Wednesday in Las Vegas.

The reason that the 11-1 Broncos are playing in something called the Maaco Bowl, and not on New Year’s Day in the most famous bowl game of them all, has been whittled to its starkest plot line: a player missed the costliest of kicks.

So, Boise State will meet Utah in Las Vegas rather than Wisconsin in Pasadena. But the real story is what it says about college football — a sport in which the financial stakes keep ballooning, the hoopla keeps expanding and the pressure to win keeps building, all while heaping the true burden of expectations and success on people like Kyle Brotzman.

“When everybody says, hey, it’s just a game,” the Western Athletic Conference commissioner, Karl Benson, said in a phone interview, “I think we all know that it’s more than a game.”

On the last play of regulation in a tie game against Nevada in Reno on Nov. 26, with a chance to keep Boise State’s national championship hopes alive and with a fallback spot in the Rose Bowl virtually assured, Brotzman pushed a 26-yard field goal a smidge to the right. In overtime, still shaken, he pulled a 29-yard attempt left. Nevada won, 34-31.

Benson is a Boise State alumnus. He is sympathetic to what Brotzman must be going through. He is also a pragmatist.

“Eight million dollars would have come to the WAC if he makes the kick,” Benson said. “That’s the reality of it.”

The Rose Bowl, like other Bowl Championship Series games, touts a per-team payout of $17 million. For teams like Boise State and others in one of the five conferences without an automatic bid, the payout is $12 million, Benson said. Boise State figured to gain $3 million, the other WAC teams would have split $5 million, and the four other second-tier conferences would have split $4 million.

Instead, Texas Christian of the Mountain West Conference is going to the Rose Bowl. Boise State will get part of the $1 million payout in Las Vegas, and the WAC will get a fraction of T.C.U.’s reward.

The missed kick also cost Boise State Coach Chris Petersen a $125,000 performance bonus due if his team reached a B.C.S. game, according to details of his latest contract. (The bonus for reaching a certain level in the N.C.A.A.’s Academic Progress Rate: $20,000.)

The most difficult loss to measure is the intangible of exposure. Last season’s Rose Bowl, between Oregon and Ohio State, had nearly six times the number of viewers as the Las Vegas Bowl between Oregon State and Brigham Young. That could affect things like Boise State’s alumni donations, application numbers and recruiting.

For a player shouldering everybody else’s interests, kicking a 26-yard field goal does not seem so simple.

“I’ve talked about the $1 million free throw and the $15 million field goal for a long time,” said the sociologist Jay Coakley, author of the textbook “Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies,” in its 10th edition. “As the structure of college football becomes increasingly professionalized, it’s just out of sync with the amateur status of the athletes.”

Simply paying players is not the answer, he said. Would the pressure on Brotzman and the fallout of his misses be any less if he was given, say, a $100-a-week stipend?

“I get really discouraged when I talk about this because I don’t see a way around it anymore,” Coakley said by phone. “Unless there is a total reconstituting of college sports, you’re going to continue to end up with these situations and these inconsistencies.”

Boise State shielded Brotzman from the news media, even local reporters, except for a subdued interview with ESPN. Boise State officials declined interview requests for Brotzman and Petersen, the coach, from The New York Times last week.

But Mike Black, Boise State’s kicker in 1990, has an idea how Brotzman feels. Against Nevada, kicking the same direction at Mackay Stadium as Brotzman did 20 years later, he missed an attempt from 37 yards to put the Broncos into the Division I-AA national championship. Nevada won in three overtimes.

“I was O.K. up until the snap of the ball, and then I just kind of locked up when I kicked it,” Black said from his home in Roseville, Calif. “I was pretty much overwhelmed by the moment.”

Black said he remained haunted by the miss, despite becoming an all-American as a senior and spending most of a decade kicking in the Arena Football League. What he never imagined was that he would be back at Mackay Stadium, in the press box as a spotter for ESPN play-by-play announcers, when Brotzman was thrust into the same situation.

Working several games a week, Black sees how much the stakes have risen in college football.

“The pressure’s ridiculous,” Black said. “You can really become unraveled if that stuff starts going through your head before you kick the ball. The pressure is insane.”

It shows no sign of subsiding. More and more universities see football as the ticket to prestige and wealth. The national championship game Jan. 10 will feature one athletic program (Oregon) that has received tens of millions of dollars in recent years from the Nike founder Phil Knight and another (Auburn) with a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Cam Newton, whose father was found to have put his son’s services up for bid to at least one program.

Boise State jumped to Division I-A (now the Football Bowl Subdivision) in the early 1990s. In a typically insatiable quest to reach the rewards at the top, it has built a powerhouse while leapfrogging conferences, from the Big West to the Big Sky to the WAC and, beginning in 2011, the Mountain West.

Those aspirations converged as Brotzman lined up for the potential game-winning kick.

“That’s what comes with the territory in today’s age,” Fresno State Coach Pat Hill, whose team lost to Northern Illinois, 40-17, on Saturday in Boise’s Humanitarian Bowl, said in a phone interview. “It may not be the right thing, but it’s part of the job description.”

Last week, after Fresno State arrived in Boise and before Boise State left for Las Vegas, Hill saw Brotzman. The kicker was 3 for 3 in field goals in a 51-0 victory over Hill’s team on Nov. 19.

“I just went up and hugged him and said: ‘You got a great future ahead of you. You’ve got to let that thing go by you,’ ” Hill said. “He was in good spirits. But that’s something that will be with him his whole life. I think he understands that’s part of the game. He’s a great young man. He had a 50-yarder the week before against us in the freezing cold. Right down the middle.”

Brotzman, from the Boise suburb of Meridian, joined the Boise State team as a walk-on. He leaves it as the program’s career leading scorer. He is 2 points from tying the Division I career scoring record for kickers.

Yet when Brotzman missed the kicks against Nevada, the fallout was immediate and disturbing. Talk-show and bulletin-board chatter was nasty. Fans established ridiculing Facebook pages. (A counter-campaign in support took hold, however, and by the end of last week about 45,000 people had signed on to a Facebook page called “The Bronco Nation Loves Kyle Brotzman.”) A man who gambled heavily on Boise State reportedly made threatening phone calls to the family home.

“There was definitely an immediate backlash: ‘This kid cost us a chance at the national championship,’ ” the Idaho Statesman sports columnist Brian Murphy said. “It helped that Oregon and Auburn kept winning, so it didn’t really lose a spot in the championship game. And then there was the backlash to the backlash.”

All this over a kick.

“They exist in this weird world,” Murphy said of big-time college athletes. “We treat them like sports heroes and professionals. And then, when they miss, they’re just kids.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 21, 2010, on page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: With $8 Million on the Line, It Is More Than Just a Game. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe